Review by Choice Review
Environmental historians have long considered the 1960s the watershed decade of the modern environmental movement. However, historian Summers (Univ. of Wisconsin Stevens-Point) reveals that in Wisconsin as early as the 1940s, a local antipollution campaign in the Fox River Valley (a 35-mile valley from Lake Winnebago to Green Bay) presaged much of the environmental warfare of ensuing decades. Yet the campaign has been overshadowed by putatively bigger environmental events of the postwar period. The battle essentials would become future standards: does an industry, pressured by an increasingly voracious consumer culture and often functioning as a region's primary economic engine, always have the right to pollute and thus trump the public's desire for a clean, healthful, aesthetically pleasing natural environment? In this case, a conglomerate of regionally powerful paper mills had historically befouled the valley. Their foes: average valley citizens, with virtually no environmental agenda and whose interest "in nature remained largely self-serving." Yet, ultimately, the citizens' groups forced tighter environmental restrictions and paved the way for greater governmental oversight in the future. The Wisconsin example would become a widespread environmental blueprint for success in subsequent decades. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. K. Edgerton Montana State University at Billings
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review